There’s more, from fried vegetable pakora to lamb meatballs to vegetable curry and all the crunchy-soft flatbread naan to go with it, refreshed at a hectic pace to feed a packed dining room.

A bustling Indian buffet. Big deal, right? The twist at Simi’s is this: It’s all good. It’s not just a stripped-down express version of the dinner menu. Every dish — from the eggplant baingan bharta to the chickpea chana masala to the mushroom matar in tomato cream — tasted right. And there was mango pudding waiting at the end.

Sure, there were the usual ignominies of the buffet line. Like who’s the jerk who fished out all the cheese from the saag paneer? And who strained all the vegetables out of the mulligatawny stew and turned it into mulligatawny broth?

But Simi’s doesn’t have the feel of a buffet battlefield like some all-you-can-eat joints. First off, the dining room is outfitted like a dinner theater, with plants and tablecloths and linen napkins. The steam table line was kept clean and well-stocked, and the congenial staff patrolled the room to refill drinks and whisk away dirty dishes.

It’s a hard act to follow. And therein lies the rub. Simi’s goes from an outstanding lunch buffet destination to a wholly ordinary a la carte dinner experience, one fraught with echoes of the value and quality of its daytime incarnation.

From the outset, it was like somebody turned out the lights. Because they did. As dinner started, the room relied solely on the waning light streaming in through the blinds. It was light enough to see, but the room gave off a dim sense of ennui as if it were still closed.

When the lights came up, they were as harsh as a single LED in a walk-in closet, casting halos of blue and yellow. And the Indian palette of oiled-up earth tones doesn’t exactly thrive in that kind of light. But at least the saag paneer had nice chunks of farm cheese this time.

The sprawling dinner menu incorporates all the stars from the buffet but forges its own identity with a range of lamb, beef, chicken, vegetable and seafood dishes plus specialty breads, pakora and tandoori entrees.

Vegetables scored big, first with a jalfrezi of carrots, peas and potatoes in a thick tomato and onion sauce and then with thick florets of cauliflower aloo gobi masala with chickpea batter and onions.

Cauliflower also showed well in a vegetable pakora mix that included spinach and potatoes, all dipped in chickpea batter and fried crispy. The same kind of batter brought a nice twist to fried shrimp, giving it a kind of puff pastry airiness.

Except for a brittle wheat roti as dry as a Triscuit, Simi’s bread game was strong, not just with the fluff-toasted naan, but with variations that incorporated crumbles of paneer and lamb and a Peshawari version with a crushed paste of nuts and raisins that gave more sweet dessert satisfaction than any of the actual desserts.

When a kitchen christens a dish with the restaurant’s own name, order it. That’s especially true with Fish Simi’s, a bubbling stew alive with tomatoes, peppers and onions that brings the heat like nothing else on the menu. Order it extra spicy.

The stewed treatment is common across the spectrum of Indian meat dishes. But it failed both the rich rogan josh and spicy vindaloo, each troubled by lamb that was stringy and tough.

Lamb also suffered in a biryani dish, served upside down so the meat hid under a prickly blanket of dried-out rice. The versatile meat found its stride in a meatball-style seekh kebab full of flavor and juice.

That kebab came from Simi’s tandoori oven, and it bore the same backyard charcoal grill flavor of all the restaurant’s tandoori meats. Chicken was the best among those, especially the dark meat pieces draped in onions and radiating the yogurt-and-spice blush of the marinade.

At lunch, that tandoori chicken was lush and hot, coming out fresh every few minutes to meet the buffet demand. At dinner, it was part of a dried-out mixed grill that cost more for one modest plate than a whole buffet.

As ever with Simi’s, we’re back to the buffet, which by itself is worth a recommendation. But what makes the buffet special — the value, the freshness, the execution, the atmosphere — gives way to an uneven presentation of Indian standards at night.

Mike Sutter is the restaurant critic and a food writer for the Express-News. Before joining the Taste team in 2016, he was a restaurant critic, editor and designer at the Austin American-Statesman and editor of the website FedManWalking.com. He’s been a guest on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio, the Cooking Channel’s “Eat Street” and KUT’s “Field and Feast.” His work has appeared on BonAppetit.com and in The Guardian. He’s won national awards for criticism and design from the Society for Features Journalism, the National Headliner Awards and the Society for News Design. Among the things he’s expensed for work: A Ouija board, a live chicken and plastic army men.